In the world of e-business, time is collapsing as business processes involving consumers, partners, suppliers and employees operate in real-time across high-speed intranets and the Internet. Business success relies upon highly available systems and the customers' Internet experience. IT managers and CIOs are faced with constantly changing technology, ever-increasing pressures to deliver, a shortage of necessary people and skills, and the ongoing difficulty in achieving alignment between IT management and overall business objectives.
What is required is a distributed large-scale management solution that can monitor, control and report the health of the IT environment across boundaries.
On the distributed systems of the present there are implemented numerous, often disparate, hardware and software solutions. These implemented solutions generate large numbers of events, including: errors, status messages, performance variables, and customer variables. For example applications can create log files, database systems can generate error or status messages, operating systems can generate messages, MICROSOFT™ WINDOWS™ can generate event logs and performance monitors, and networks can generate SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) events.
In order to assist the management of these systems what is desired is a system for coordinating and consolidating the multitude of events from across the distributed systems.
To address the problem of managing large numbers of events from different sources two approaches have been taken:                1) Event flow model. The event flow model while very flexible tends to become very complex to implement and requires the end user to learn a language and to also have design skills.        2) A rules engine. The rules engine also requires learning of a language and structurally becomes tremendously complicated when describing complex rules.        
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for managing events from a multitude of sources which overcomes the disadvantages of the above prior art and meets the requirements of real world distributed systems, or at least provides the public with a useful choice.